The “Look” Challenge

Alright, so I was called out by Constance Masters to do the “Look” challenge, which is you find 3 examples from your work-in-progress where you use the word “look”… Which is a word that we use strangely often as a society, I’d never noticed.

The rules? “The challenge is to find the word LOOK in your current work in progress and then post the sentences around it. Choose your three favorite Looks to post. “

What made this challenge difficult is that I just finished one, but am doing major changes on it still, so I might be cheating by using “Learning to Blush” as one of them… but fuck it, I’m doing it anyway, just because I’m still re-written whole chapters of that thing. 🙂

Anyway, so needless to say. Works in progress means… Any of the following might change at any time or be removed altogether if I have to rewrite a chapter or two. I do that sometimes since I just sort of roll into a story without a plot outline, which drives my husband/publisher insane, but he loves me anyway because of that whole vow thing. 🙂

Also, I might have chosen more than a few sentences “around” look. I wanted to put in a full excerpt around the goddamn word, so I did. Might have I killed the essence of the challenge? Hopefully not… I think it’s still breathing…

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Excerpt from Learning to Blush: The Swarii Brides, Book Two

His hand smacked down again and again as Ellie tried to twist back and forth, trying to fall off of his lap somehow. After the third smack, Jack shifted his knee and she stopped twisting around. Instead, she now tried to kick as much as possible as his hand came down with a firm smack, smack, smack. Her bottom began to glow bright red already; far more quickly than he remembered from spanking any of his daughters or his wife. “I’ll teach you to throw a tantrum, little girl. Stubborn, disrespectful… insulting…!” he said, listing her offenses grimly. Thorton stood against the wall, completely expressionless except the dark, tired look behind his eyes as he watched her punishment with his bulky arms crossed tightly against his chest.

“I’m not your slave!” she cried. “You can’t just tell us what to do because we’re smaller and we look different!”

“Girl, I look on you like my own daughter!” he growled.

“No, you don’t!” she cried. “You look at me like I’m your pet! Every time we run into a cultural rift, you immediately assume you’re right and we’re wrong because you think your species is superior. We’re adults where we’re from, but you think you can treat my family like they’re kids because the arbitrary age you chose to define adults doesn’t match up with ours!”

“I’m representing the admiralty, which you want to have crawl like a dog!”

“I’m representing my species, which you already have crawling around like a dog!” she retorted.

Her voice cracked then, and she gave a tear-ridden whimper. “I won’t do it…” she whined miserably, wrapping her slender arms around Jack’s thigh as he spanked and shaking her head. She stopped arguing, in too much pain now to do so. She only sobbed, “I won’t…! I won’t!”

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Excerpt from Otherworldly Discipline, Book Two: The True Master

Maili recoiled from the wizard as he violently snatched the violin out of her hands. The movement was so forceful, her body froze like she had been frozen to the spot, watching him quickly and ever-so-gently put the violin back in its original place. After it was safely set on its stand, he slowly turned back to her.

The darkness in his eyes was terrifying, and he was even harder to look at than he usually was. His piercing blue eyes, normally the most handsome thing about him, were now warning her that she was in danger from him. “What the hell do you think you were doing?” he snarled like a beast, arching his tall body over her.

She backed up slowly as if he might rip her arms out at any second, trying not to anger him any further. She had never been so frightened in her whole life, her heart had never beaten so fast. “I-I-I…” That was all she could muster for a response, her throat was too dry to come out with words. She glanced out of the side of her eye for an escape.

“LOOK AT ME!” he roared at her. She hadn’t realized she had dropped her eyes at all; his frightfulness had burned against her retina. Even though she was now staring at the floor she knew what horror awaited for her when she looked back up to his scared face. Slowly, she lifted her chin, daring to look at him again. “NEVER touch anything in here. NEVER come in here!” he half-roared, half-hissed at her, and then his voice quieted as he continued, his words spitting at her. “If you had snapped a single string, I would feel the need to snap your neck. Do you understand?”

“Y-y-y…” She couldn’t remember having stuttered before, but now it was all she could do. Her brain felt frozen, unable to think when the wizard was that close to her. He was so much bigger, taller, and stronger than her, she was realizing. He wouldn’t need magic to kill me; he could do it with his bare hands.

Suddenly she felt a warm hand on her shoulder, and it pulled her to the side towards the door. She dared to glance away from the wizard in front of her, like Ashcroft Medwin was a violent storm coming towards her, and then she saw the golden buttons of Moriarty’s vest.

“Master, calm down,” Moriarty said in a very steady voice, pulling Maili behind his body protectively.

She was certain she had never been so grateful to anyone before in her life. Who on Earth would step in front of someone like that? Someone who was insane with anger?

“I want her out of here. Tonight. I want her gone,” Ashcroft hissed.

In the Northern Realm, getting thrown out just before nightfall was a death-sentence. Tears stung at her eyes; she couldn’t think of what to do, how to defend herself… Suddenly running into Damen’s men was the least of her worries. She had seen the creatures that roamed outside.

But Moriarty’s voice remained steady as he lied, “Master, she didn’t know. I didn’t tell her she couldn’t come up here. She’s too new. It was my mistake, I should have done.”

Ashcroft’s eyes slitted even more, but it was clear that his anger had elevated slightly. “Make sure all the servants know not to come up here when you hire them, then! Nobody comes up here!”

Moriarty nodded and bowed his head, “Yes, Master.”

Ashcroft went to leave the room, and Moriarty moved his body so that he was always between herself and Ashcroft. Ashcroft leaned his face close to Moriarty’s as he hissed, “I want her punished. Nobody touches my things.”

Moriarty nodded. “She will be,” he promised easily.

The wizard gave Moriarty a look of angry sadness before he turned and marched out of the room and back onto the stairway. He marched so quickly with such wide steps, that in seconds she and Moriarty had heard the Wizard’s heavy bed-chamber’s door slam shut.

She let out a breath of air, relieved like she had never been before, but it didn’t last. Moriarty turned and grabbed her by her ear and led her out of the room. When he let go, he propelled her just outside as he pulled the music room’s door shut and locked it behind him, hissing, “I don’t know what you were thinking by playing that violin! What possessed you to do such a thing? Why’s you enter that room in the first place? You were told not to, weren’t you?”

She swallowed again and nodded. “Yes,” she said, words coming back to her. “But… I–“

Oh, if only there was a way for Sophie to dig a hole in the ground in the middle of the cell and bury herself, she would have done. “Daddy” had come to her rescue… But who was going to rescue her from him?

How could Liz have done this to her? She was sure that she was going to be the one picking her up, and that was going to be bad enough! Liz wasn’t just her ‘Mommy’, after all… She was the only lawyer she knew. Weren’t lawyers supposed to be the ones doing the ‘bailing’?

Joe’s voice mumbled from the next room, sounding far from excited, and she couldn’t make out any of his words. She sat there, looking at the door to the cell block, waiting for her impending doom. It seemed to take forever; there was surely paper work and the bail to be paid, but waiting with Joe in the building was somehow a million times worse than waiting before he had arrived.

She wrung her hands on her lap as she sat on the cot, waiting, her stomach tightening itself into knots.

Sometimes, before Daddy gave her a spanking, there would be that fluttery butterfly feeling in her guts, instead. She would feel something akin to excitement about it; Daddy was the most handsome man she had ever seen. Sure, some girls in the dorms hung up posters of Johnny Depp or Russell Crowe; but she just had a picture of Daddy on her desk. She could pick it up and stare at it whenever she wanted, imagining the feel of his big, calloused hand on her bottom, or the feeling of his fingers tickling her clit until she screamed with one orgasm after another.

Now, all the butterflies were dead; frozen. All she could feel was this lowly feeling of dread that was quickly seeping into her bones. Would Joe even forgive her? She had no doubts that he would bail her out no matter if he was going to ‘break up’ with her or not. She had screwed up before, but this was a big, giant screw-up of epic proportions. He’d lost a sister due to drunk driving, and there Sophie was, still nursing a hangover, guilt written all over her driving record after being pulled over last night. She had not acted like ‘his little girl’; she had acted like a stupid college student. Joe’s surely hung up his fantasy before he came to the station, and he had a three-hour-drive out there to let his anger boil up to not even giving her a ride back to the college.

How had she fucked up this badly? Joe was everything in her life that was good, and she’d done everything in her power to blow it. And she thought she was in danger because of her failing grades before she even drank the first beer…

When the door opened, only the police officer came back with a overfilled ring of keys swinging off his fingers as he tried to find the one to her cell before he fully approached. “You never told me Joe Hobbs was your boyfriend,” the police officer said when he came up. He was still grinning from excitement as he met the well-decorated football-star-turned-announcer.

“I was hoping that someone else would pick me up,” she admitted with a mutter.

“I understand that; the man looks pretty unhappy,” the officer divulged, finally finding the key. “You probably saw that coming. If my own wife got picked up driving her car as drunk as a skunk like you were last night…” The officer whistled and shook his head. “She wouldn’t be sitting comfortably for a whole month of Sundays.”

Sophie’s eyes went round as saucers. She had never heard a spanking threat outside of Joe’s world, and there it was: right before Joe killed her with one. Or dumped her all together. She could not imagine any other future for her; she was going to have a broken heart or a broken ass by the time the day was through.

“Come on, time to face the music,” the police officer grumbled at her, opening the bars so she could step out in front of him.

The short walk between her cell and the door to the reception room felt like the long walk to the electric chair. The officer had to push her slightly by her shoulder, guiding her to the door more quickly. He unlocked and opened the door to the reception room and she took a deep breath before walking out.

She took one good look at the giant man standing by the door with a firm glare and a locked jaw before her eyes were blinded by a veil of tears. “I’m sorry,” she choked out immediately.

“Save it, Baby Girl,” he said, swiping his hand through the air. “All I want to hear from you right now is if you’re okay.”

Her heart felt like it was literally clenching in her chest. He had never been so cold towards her! He WAS going to leave her!

She nodded and swallowed back tears just to be able to speak at all. “Yeah, I’m okay.”

The officer went back to his reception, looking like he was shuffling up some papers for her to sign, but Joe leaned down to whisper in her ear and picked up her hand to drop his keys in them, “I need to walk for a moment. You’re going to take these keys, sign the papers you need to, then you’re going to go out to the car and wait for me in the backseat with your pants pulled down. You’re about to see a side of me you’ve never seen before.”

She didn’t know whether to blush or faint. With wobbly legs, she walked to the desk and signed where she was told to. Joe walked out the front door, slamming the door behind him.

* * *

Didn’t know I was working on an AgePlay, didja? Oh, yes. AND another Menage Tres story. I’m trying to engineer some sort of naughty train so I can pull it into the station. 🙂 Hope you liked those excerpts, y’all! And thanks, Constance, for the challenge!